


You Love Me

by swampthot



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 03:10:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14607969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swampthot/pseuds/swampthot
Summary: Post-DDL. Charlie comes over to Mac's apartment and hears him leaving Dennis a voicemail.





	You Love Me

**Author's Note:**

> prompt fill from tumblr that got a little out of hand

Mac has always been there for Charlie, until he hasn’t.

The dude was always shit at emotional stuff, genuinely, undeniably garbage, but ever since they were kids Charlie had found his mere presence so anchoring and so calming that he was, like, helping him without even knowing it.

And sure, as the years progressed, they really had grown apart, new bonds forged with other people blossoming in the space where their bond had been torn asunder, but they were still both a part of the gang, they spent all their time together, and Charlie didn’t really have time to miss Mac.

Except for when he did; when he started forgetting some of the memories they’d made together as kids, when he would pass the corner store they used to steal booze from in high school, whenever he would see Mac look at Dennis with the most hopeful expression in the world before Dennis inevitably cut him down.

But now Charlie’s walking into Mac’s apartment, ‘cause the door is completely ajar, and Mac said he could come over, and he immediately freezes when he hears a whispered, “I love you. Call me.”

The voice is… definitely Mac’s. He take a moment to suppress his burning curiosity. Steels his nerves. “Mac?” he calls out from the living room.

“Oh, h- Hey, Charlie.” Mac’s voice sounds, admittedly, just a little bit raw. Charlie wonders if he has a cold.

“I thought you wanted to have some beers?” Charlie says. “Watch something?” His voice is a little higher than normal; he just feels so weird.

“Yeah, sure, dude.” Mac finally appears to Charlie, standing in the doorway of his old bedroom. He just looks tired and worn down, and his eyes are puffy, either from a lack of sleep or something else entirely. Charlie doesn’t comment on it.

Mac grabs two beers out of the fridge and opens them as Charlie sits down on the nice, new couch. Without Dennis in it, the living room feels undeniably empty, yet Dennis’s presence is hanging over them more powerfully than ever. Mac turns the TV on low volume and they both pretend to watch it, sitting a cushion apart from one another.

Charlie takes a few sips of his beer, and suddenly can’t hold back the question any longer. “Who were you talking to?”

Mac turns his head to him, slightly startled, like a deer in the headlights. “How much of that did you hear, Charlie?”  
“Just-” Charlie falters, not wanting to let him know. “Something about a call.”

Mac exhales slowly, turning back to look at the TV. “I was just trying to get in touch with Dennis.”

Charlie takes a moment to process that. Dennis had left them all bereft when he’d walked out the door of Paddy’s a week ago, he knew that. He’d left a gaping hole where there had once been a megalomaniacal twink (was he using that word correctly? Mac had only just taught him that) attempting to control every little thing, and now their group had even less direction than before. But he thought the gang had this unspoken agreement about not lowering themselves enough to chase after Dennis.

Mac was evidently moving in his own path of orbit, a path, Charlie felt with dread, that would collide with Dennis’s own again, and would change shit up. Charlie didn’t care for change very much, but right now, staring at the empty shell of Mac, he mostly just didn’t care for Dennis.

Feeling a little braver, but mostly just curious, he asks, “What did you say to him?”

Mac is quiet for a long time, and Charlie assumes he’s just going to ignore his question, like it’s just a stupid Charlie thing to say, but then Mac says hollowly, “I asked him when he was gonna come back.”

Charlie turns to look at him now, leaning forward with concern, eyes soft with pity. Goddamn if despite what the years have done to him, he doesn’t suddenly feel protective of Mac like when they were kids, and Mac would try his very hardest to protect him physically, and Charlie would try to keep what everyone said about Mac from hurting his feelings. “Oh dude…” Charlie really doesn’t know what to say, but he inclines his head for Mac to keep talking.

“I know he like,” Mac says, and falters. “I know I scared him off with the apartment. But he didn’t have to leave me here.” A tear rolls down his cheek and oh, God, Charlie realizes, he had been crying earlier, Goddamn, he had been leaving little voicemails to Dennis saying he missed him and loved him and wanted him to come home, and Dennis was just letting him expose all his feelings like that all at once, and Dennis was also going to leave him like that with no response. Mac inhales shakily, and then says, “What’s so wrong with me that he had to leave?”

Charlie now feels his jaw beginning to tighten, and he can’t help it. This is like everything Dennis has ever done to Mac, every bait-and-switch pulled, but worse, and all at once. The DENNIS System. And it really was infallible.

“Mac,” he says slowly. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Mac doesn’t answer.

“You guys were everything to each other,” Charlie continues, trying to hold back his wince on the word everything. “He didn’t leave because of you. I think he left ‘cause that’s who he is.”

The blue light of the television flickering on Mac’s face has made him look softer and younger, and for a moment this feels like a conversation they had twenty years ago. For once, though, Charlie’s not yearning for the past. He wants to go back and change it and end the cycle that leads the two of them here, every time, both of them desperately missing someone and separated by a seat cushion’s worth of distance that might as well be a galaxy.

“That’s the-” Mac’s voice hitches in his chest. “I always thought that wasn’t who he is.”

“But it is, dude.” Charlie’s voice, starting out soft, begins to harden. “He did all that shit to you. He will continue doing messed up shit to you. Don’t you see that?”

“Nah, you don’t know what you’re talking about, Charlie.” This is Mac’s I-know-more-about-the-universe-and-God-than-you voice, just a little bit more broken. “Our friendship is way more complicated than that.” He takes a sip of his beer- He’s regaining his composure, and Charlie feels like he’s on the verge of losing his.

Mac has always had such a rigid faith in just these very few things: in God, in his heterosexuality, and in his relationship with Dennis. Anything that threatened these three things was in his mind of zero consequence, because these three things were, in his mind, objective fact. Charlie had thought Mac was growing so much, and he was so thrilled to watch him grow and become confident in his sexuality and he had thought, he had really thought, that if Mac could come out in his forties, he could move past any mental block he stubbornly created for himself.

God, he had really thought. Dumbass move for a person like Charlie.

“Dude, there’s nothing wrong with you,” he says again, “but you are just as dense as you have ever been.” Charlie is immediately wishing he could take his words right back. Mac looks shocked for a second, like a kicked puppy in a way that it hurt Charlie to see, and then he looks angry.

“What are you talking about, dude?”

“You can’t see what’s right goddamn there in front of you,” Charlie says angrily. It’s gushing out of him now and he can’t begin to stop it. “You think the whole rest of the world died ‘cause Dennis doesn’t live here anymore. You build an entire life around him, when he obviously doesn’t want it, and he leaves you alone with it, so you just sit here and wait for him and you don’t-” Charlie take a breath to steady himself. “You don’t see that you still have, like friends, man, who care for you just like he did, and it’s so fucking stupid.”

Mac really does look hurt, and angry, and embarrassed right now, but goddamn, Charlie’s repressed this shit for twenty years. “You’re so obtuse, dude, you told me it was a sin to be a tranny when I tried to come out to you.” Charlie feels the phantom squeeze of a binder around his chest like he’s sixteen again, desperately trying any method he can to escape from his own body, and it’s been years and years since his surgery, but he’ll never really get over it.

Mac blinks for a second, and shock and confusion momentarily break through his angry mask. “Charlie-”

“You kept saying that word around me too, Mac, you never really stopped, you called your girlfriend a tranny-” His voice is rising to the same breaking point it always does when he’s going to cry, and fuck. “And I know- I know exactly how you see me, okay?” He’s kind of panicking now, trying not to cry. He hasn’t had such a deep-cutting conversation with Mac in years. “You just keep-”

“Charlie-”

“You just,” Charlie says, quietly and more steadily. “You refuse to see what’s actually going on. And it’s not just hurting you.” He can’t get any more specific than that without the threat of tears, so he swallows his words and looks at the floor.

“Get out of my apartment.” Mac is quiet, for once, more or less calm, for once, and Charlie’s heart is splintering in his chest, just like old times.

He walks to the bar in the pouring rain, because he doesn’t want to face Frank at home, and he has way more chemicals there to do shit with than at his apartment anyway, and he digs in his pocket for his keys and lets himself in.

He sweeps the floors for a while. They are, in fact, filthy, and he just needs to be doing something with his hands. He ignores the phone call he hears from the back office and after about three hours of alternately sweeping, huffing glue, or laying down in the booth watching the ceiling move, he hears a knock.

Mac is standing, very much sopping wet like a puppy dog, wide eyes like a puppy dog, and Charlie is taken completely aback.

“Frank said you were here,” Mac says lamely.

“Dude, you kicked me out of your apartment, I really don’t, like-”

“Wait,” Mac says, catching the door just as Charlie attempts to shut it. “Charlie. I just-” He closes his eyes, sighs, and runs a hand through his hair. “All the shit you were saying about- About Dennis, and how he doesn’t love m-”

“Mac, I-”

“You love me.” Mac opens his eyes, and pins Charlie there with his gaze, pleading, yet insistent, searching desperately for a sign. “Right?”

Charlie, yeah, he’s always thought Mac lived his life through the lens of a series of truths, truths he viewed as objectively true, that couldn’t be disproven. What Charlie had never counted on was his love for Mac being one of these truths, but there it is.

“I love you, Mac,” Charlie says, tears blurring his vision and dripping from his cheeks like the raindrops dripping from Mac’s hair. Mac walked all the way here for him in the rain. “I always have, you know that. Since we were kids.”

“But do you-” Mac swallows and trains his eyes more intently on Charlie. “Do you love me like- Like-” Charlie can feel the weight of so many years of repression in Mac’s words, and Mac, as ever, can’t move past that block he’s set up for himself. He’s never told another man how he feels about him, Charlie realizes with a jolt, and he’s not going to start now.

But Charlie will.

Charlie reaches for him, taking Mac’s face in his hands, and kisses him gently, as the rain beats down on the sidewalk. With a choked noise, Mac lets go of the door and holds tight to Charlie, kissing him fiercer, and with more intensity. They really never did have much to say to each other with just words, and it was the actions, and the gestures, and the touches, and the hugs, all that with which they’d helped each other through the darkest times in their lives, without which they might not be alive right now.

Their lips sort of drift apart and Mac ends up resting his forehead on Charlie’s, breathing with him, taking up the same air, and he asks, “Charlie, did you say all that shit because you thought I replaced you with Dennis?”

Charlie doesn’t answer, and Mac, gently, presses a kiss to his forehead and holds him even tighter. “Just because I loved him,” he mumbles, “Doesn’t mean I didn’t always love you.”


End file.
